Editor’s note: The author is a content development leader at a leading BPO who has a thing for music old and new, and an affinity to bodies of water. His column begins this week and appears every Wednesday thereafter.
“WHERE are we going?” A coworker asked as we turned a corner. I said, “Back to the office, why?” He laughed. I suddenly realized we were headed away from the office. I was taking a familiar route and I had gone on autopilot thinking that I was on my home. They call it force of habit. However you may want to call it, habits play a very important role in developing your personality and making you, well, uniquely you.
This space will deal with the most important person in the world, which of course is you. This column will endeavor to help you build your image to friends, officemates, and everybody else in between, this without losing your own unique identity so you can confidently be in a class of your own. A good grasp of how habits build your personality helps you understand how each little thing in your day can actually bring you closer to your ideal self. The year has just started and it is rife with possibilities of how you can become the person you want to be.
Habits are little things you unconsciously do everyday and the choices you make. Habits define what you value and show to others where your affinities lie. They are formed when you do something repeatedly, like driving on the same route going home, that your brain becomes accustomed to it. This gives you time to think of something else, like mentally going through your grocery list while navigating through Manila traffic.
Understanding the nature of habits can also help you figure out how and why you favor something—be it a particular brand of shoes or bags, a type of alcoholic drink, a variety of chocolate and so on. These are not inherently bad in themselves when done in moderation, but when these control your other activities and take over your everyday thought, they can become a hindrance to your success. Bad habits can take up valuable time that could have been spent instead on improving yourself, which could then lead to self-destructive choices and decisions.
While your New Year’s resolutions are still fresh, now is the best time to evaluate your daily activities and identify which are helpful to achieving these resolutions. You need to bolster those activities that will help you toward those goals, and decisively break down the habits that have become a hindrance. It is easier to stop bad habits when they have not yet taken root, instead of letting them grow and take over other aspects of your life.
In order to do that, you have to know how habits are formed.
A cursory review of available literature will tell you that it takes a minimum of 21 days to form a habit. A more detailed research will reveal that for more difficult habits to form, you need more than 21 days for something to be hardwired into your brain in what researchers call automaticity—doing something without even thinking about it. This explains how a trial cup of coffee in the afternoon later on becomes your go-to drink to stay alert, and in time this becomes your norm. Pretty soon, you cannot stay alert in the afternoon without coffee.
Habits are powerful building blocks of your personality. What you do repeatedly inadvertently becomes what you are. And if you want your New Year resolutions to stick, you need to take careful thought and deliberation. Some habits are borne out of necessity, like brushing your teeth, taking a bath, or cleaning your room. These prevent you from getting sick and allow you to socialize freely. Work habits also help you get through the workload—e.g., listing down what you need to do for the day, regularly coaching your supervisors, or checking up on your project deliverables. These are habits that make wise use of your time and not just build your credibility but also deposit goodwill in the emotional banks of people under you, which will pay out in significant dividends later on.
As a new manager, my director took the time to have weekly skip-level discussions with me because she wanted to know what was going on with my team. At the same time, she also wanted to talk to me about my personal concerns. I was terrified. It was something new and I did not know her well enough to know what to expect on those meetings which occasionally filled me with apprehension. After a few meeting, I was no longer reporting what was going on with my team as much as discussing with her how we could improve my team’s productivity and efficiency. In as little as three months, she was already picking my brain for strategies and involving me in planning. She helped me develop the habit of looking at the vision for the team and how it would benefit not just the department but the company in the long run. She was deliberate in building that habit in me and, unconsciously, I adopted her way of thinking.
On the other hand, there are some habits that take up so much of our time with nothing to show for it. Take stock of your daily activities and evaluate which ones you spend time on and look at the bigger picture, then ask yourself if it will help you achieve your New Year resolution/s. You might be surprised that when you become more mindful of the things you are doing, you will find that a few seemingly inconsequential things eat up so much of your time and deviate from what you want to accomplish for yourself.
List those down and next week, we will look at how you can abandon those bad habits and replace them with new ones to create the best version of yourself this 2019.